Creative in Struggle, Watchful in Liberty
Religious Communities and the Secret Police in 20th Century Romania
By (author) Iuliana Cindrea-Nagy
Hardback (Forthcoming)
(November 2026)
ISBN: 9783506706027
6.1 x 9.25 inches
Price: $109.00
How do persecuted communities survive under regimes determined to erase them? This study uncovers the creative resistance of two homegrown Romanian religious communities as seen through the archives of the secret police that directly targeted them.
Spanning 1918 to 1989, the book traces the Old Calendarists and the Tudorists across a succession of political regimes, from interwar democracy and royal dictatorship to fascism, Antonescu’s military rule, and communism, each with its own way of regulating and repressing religious life. Facing surveillance and persecution, these communities produced icons, photographs, handwritten songbooks, letters, and postcards that expressed both faith and defiance. Confiscated as incriminating evidence, these objects now testify to the wrongdoings of the regimes that targeted them. Reading the archive through its material and visual traces rather than its text alone, Iuliana Cindrea-Nagy reveals how constraints can become an engine of boundless creativity.
Iuliana Cindrea-Nagy is an associate researcher at the “Ioan Petru Culianu” Research Institute for the Study of Religions (UMFST, Târgu Mureș), where she teaches in the MA programme History of Religion – Religion and Politics. She completed her PhD at University College Cork. Her research focuses on religious minorities and the religious underground in twentieth-century Romania, and the material traces of clandestine religious life.
- By (author) Iuliana Cindrea-Nagy
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